Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular

Lois Lee

Abstract

In recent years, the extent to which contemporary societies are secular has come under scrutiny. At the same time, many countries have increasingly large non-affiliate, ‘subjectively secular’ populations, and actively non-religious cultural movements such as the New Atheism and the Sunday Assembly have come to prominence. Making sense of secularity and irreligion, and the relationship between them, has therefore emerged as a crucial task for those seeking to understand contemporary societies and the nature of ‘modern’ life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in southeast England, this book deve ... More

In recent years, the extent to which contemporary societies are secular has come under scrutiny. At the same time, many countries have increasingly large non-affiliate, ‘subjectively secular’ populations, and actively non-religious cultural movements such as the New Atheism and the Sunday Assembly have come to prominence. Making sense of secularity and irreligion, and the relationship between them, has therefore emerged as a crucial task for those seeking to understand contemporary societies and the nature of ‘modern’ life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in southeast England, this book develops a new vocabulary, theory, and methodology for thinking about the secular. It distinguishes between separate and incommensurable aspects of so-called secularity as insubstantial and substantial. Recognizing the cultural forms that present themselves as non-religious—as distinct from secularity as the irrelevance or religious and religious-like cultural forms—opens up new, more egalitarian, and more theoretically coherent ways of thinking about people who are ‘not religious’ alongside those who are traditionally religious or alternatively spiritual. Identifying the non-religious in this way not only gives rise to new research questions and theoretical possibilities about how non-religious people sense and perform their difference from religious others, but allows us to reimagine the secular itself, in new and productive ways.

End Matter

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